Add an Empty Directory to Git
Have you ever seen a directory containing a single .gitkeep? Today I learned the history of that file.
Git won't let us add an empty directory, but sometimes there's a good reason to want to do that. For instance, I'm building a single-page app that requireds a src/data/ directory, even when there's no data. Instead of each developer on the project making this directory by hand, I'd like to check it into version control.
There are two competing strategies to achieve this: adding a .gitkeep to the directory, or adding a .gitignore. I prefer .gitkeep because the name tells you what it does and it's not conventionally used for another purpose.
$ touch src/data/.gitkeep